[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 10916-10917]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      DOING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I support the memorandum of understanding. 
It took the nuclear option off the table. It is gone for our lifetime. 
We don't have to talk about it anymore. I am disappointed there are 
still the threats of the nuclear option. Let's move on. We need not go 
over this, but there were 218 nominees of the President and we turned 
down 10.
  All filibusters are extraordinary. There will be filibusters of 
judges and of other things. That is what the Senate is all about. That 
is what the 14 Senators acknowledged. I admire and respect what they 
did. I am thankful they kept me advised as to what they were doing. It 
is too bad there were not other opportunities to make a ``deal'' 
between the majority leader and me.
  We have to understand that the Senate needs to operate. I say to my 
friend, the distinguished majority leader, there was an agreement made 
on three judges. We feel the merits of those three judges are not good 
and that we need time to talk about those three judges. We will 
continue to do that. The rules of the Senate have not been changed. 
That is what is so good about the agreement of these 14 Senators, who 
rose above the battle and did the right thing.
  I am willing to work with the majority leader. I have said that 
publicly and privately. But we have to be realistic. Unless we work 
into next week, we cannot do all these judges. If that is

[[Page 10917]]

the order--that we are going to work into next week--people should be 
told that now. We are willing to work within the confines of the rules 
of the Senate. If cloture is invoked today, the rule is you get 30 
hours. We are happy to work on that to shorten it a little bit and to 
have a vote sometime tomorrow and then go to other matters. I would 
think we could go to another judge--a controversial judge. We have 
indicated that the judges from Michigan are not controversial. They 
were held up on procedural things because of longstanding problems with 
the Michigan Senators. We would need to debate that for a while.
  We are here to work the will of the Senate. Again, I am somewhat 
disappointed that we still hear threats of nuclear option. That is 
gone. Let's forget about it. I am happy that one of the things the 14 
talked about is having some consultation with the President. I am 
confident that will work out better for the White House and the Senate. 
I hope that transpires. We here want to move forward. We have so much 
that needs to be done.
  The distinguished majority leader has talked about things that need 
to be done, such as the Bolton nomination, which is also controversial. 
We will be happy to try to work to some degree to make that as easy as 
possible for everybody. It is a difficult issue. I have spoken to 
Senator Biden early this morning. He has a plan as to what he feels 
should be done on Bolton. None of this is going to take an hour or two. 
There are things we have to talk about with Bolton.
  As I indicated last night, last night was a good day for the Senate 
and today is a good day. Let's move forward and work as the Senate 
feels it should work. There have been no rule changes. We are here to 
do the will of the people of this country.

                          ____________________